Take No Farewell - Retail (10 page)

‘Indeed I do, sir. It’s just the objective with which I could most readily sympathize.’

‘Good.’ Thornton smiled. ‘We have an option on a site in Russell Square. How would you like to design something for us in such a location?’

‘Very much. It goes without saying. I’d be honoured.’

‘I should tell you that you’re not the only architect we’ve approached. We’ve also asked Mewès & Davis to submit a design.’

With the Ritz to their credit, Mewès & Davis were the obvious choice. It hardly seemed possible that I could be considered as an alternative. ‘An excellent firm,’ I stumbled, ‘with the highest credentials.’

‘Who appeal to some more conservative members of the board,’ said Thornton. ‘But as I told you, young man, I favour an element of novelty. That is what took my eye about Clouds Frome.
Your
work. Nobody else’s.’

It can happen sometimes that one architect’s style and his alone will satisfy a client. Then matters of reputation become irrelevant. For me to be such an architect and Ashley
Thornton
such a client was a stroke of the most amazing good fortune. No matter what his board thought, his expression implied, he would make the final decision. He was giving me a chance I would have been a fool to ignore. ‘I believe I’m equal to the task, sir. It’s a challenge I’d be proud to accept.’ I found myself on my feet, shaking him by the hand.

‘I’d like to have preliminary sketches by the end of the month. Do you think you can manage that?’

‘I’m sure I can.’

‘Splendid. Our head of planning can give you all the necessary details. I’ll have him see you now.’

We moved towards the door, delectable possibilities multiplying in my head. A large hotel in the middle of Bloomsbury. A client requiring only the best who was also an admirer of my work. Space in which to express myself and the money with which to do it. The Hotel Thornton: its entrance, its façade, its proportions already forming in my imagination. For its architect, celebrity, wealth, even glory. The potential was limitless, the attraction irresistible.

Half an hour later, I was striding east along Piccadilly, rehearsing the pleasures of telling Imry what a prize had just fallen into our lap. Suddenly, I pulled up sharply, so sharply that somebody behind collided with me. I should have apologized, but all I did was stare dumbly as they grumbled and glowered. I felt, for the moment, incapable of speech. It was as if a cloud had blotted out the sun. A realization had come to me with ghastly force, more ghastly still because I had forgotten it till then, forgotten what could not possibly be accomplished if Thornton’s proposal were to become a reality.

I sought refuge in one of the arcades leading to Jermyn Street and there, leaning against an art dealer’s window, I struggled to collect my thoughts. Even if Thornton was the most broad-minded of men, his fellow-directors were unlikely to be. And, besides, I could not design a London
hotel
from a bolt-hole in Paris, far less the other side of the world. It was completely out of the question. I was a few days away from transforming my life and Consuela’s with it. I had no business accepting Thornton’s offer or dreaming of the fame and fortune it might lead to, for they could not be mine if my vows to Consuela were to be honoured. The only course open to me was to return at once to Thornton’s office and to withdraw from the affair as swiftly and gracefully as possible.

I walked slowly down the arcade and reached its end. Right lay the direction I should have taken, but I turned left and quickened my pace. Jermyn Street was empty in the oven-hot air and I was walking fast, though not fast enough for my peace of mind. I was not sweating. I did not even feel warm. Something cold and hard and ruthless had formed within me, something I could neither admit nor defeat. And I hurried on, surrendering to its grip.

Imry opened a bottle of champagne when he heard the news. He knew, as did I, that a hotel such as Thornton envisaged would be the making of our partnership. We took a cab to Russell Square and sat on a bench in the gardens forming its centre, smoking celebratory cigars and surveying the block of buildings which our client had acquired.

‘How did you pull this off, Geoff?’ said Imry with a grin. ‘It’s the chance of a lifetime.’

‘He’d seen the piece in
The Builder
about Clouds Frome.’

‘But an hotel? I’d have expected him to look no further than Mewès & Davis. Or Fitzroy Doll.’

‘He wants something different. Something original.’

‘Then let him have it, I say. Any idea what you’ll suggest?’

The afternoon sun was dazzling, the pigeons on the grass about us torpid in the heat. Shafts of brilliance seemed to invade the square from all angles and it was this perhaps – this scorching purity of light – that planted the concept in my mind.

‘Simplicity, Imry, that’s the key. Steel frame, I think,
to
maximize daylight. Stone-faced to give it weight and authority. A Classical frontage, blending happily with its surroundings. Inside, all the richness of detail the patrons would expect, but no baroque gloom or palm court undergrowth. Light and space. The apogee of luxury – with room to breathe.’ I turned to look at him. ‘What do you think?’

He was still grinning. ‘I think it sounds wonderful.’

‘I’ll need your help, of course. Elevations, projections, floor plans, artist’s impressions. We need to present Thornton with a complete set of proposals by the end of the month.’

‘Then I suggest we knuckle down. Some midnight oil needs to be burned. You’ll cancel your weekend at Clouds Frome, I take it? We can work through—’

‘No!’ I interrupted. ‘I have to go to Clouds Frome.’

‘But surely—’

‘Don’t try to dissuade me, Imry. You’ll be wasting your breath. I must be there, take it from me.’

‘Some problem I don’t know about, old chap?’

‘You could say that.’

‘If I can offer any advice – help in any way—’

‘Thanks, but nobody can help me with this. It’s something I have to deal with alone. When I get back, I’ll be able to give the Thornton project my undivided attention. Until then …’

‘Yes?’

‘Until then, Imry, wish me luck.’

My shame deepens as my tale progresses. How could I have done it? How could I have turned my back on all the hopes and dreams I had shared with Consuela? She had offered to give up everything for me and this was her reward. To be thrown over. Abandoned. Betrayed. And for what? Not for the sake of duty or moral scruple, but because of greed, because of my selfish desire to be thought and acclaimed a famous architect. A pile of stones in a London square. A cairn to spurious immortality. That was all. Something the younger version of myself I hardly recognize craved more
than
the love and loyalty of a beautiful woman. And what he craved he was to have, measured in rubble, brick-dust and hollow applause. He did not pause to count the cost. He did not consider for one moment the repercussions his treachery would have. He was young, vain, cruel and foolish. And he was something else as well. He was a man I despise. He was what I once was, the one thing I can never escape. And his are the debts I am still paying. To this very day. Out of self-loathing comes candour. I shall not spare myself. I shall not try to soften the shameful record of my conduct from that moment on. I tried to convince myself I was only doing what was right and sensible, ending an impossible dalliance, extricating Consuela from an unsustainable future. But that was a lie and I knew it. The truth was that I had decided to disregard her needs, her ambitions and her hopes in order to pursue my own. The truth was that I had decided to betray her.

‘Do you know the worst of it, Imry?’ I said, as we stood in the doorway of Sunnylea that Saturday afternoon last October.

‘You think she may be guilty after all.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you think that makes you guilty too.’

‘Well it does, doesn’t it? If I’d not treated her so despicably. If I’d not thrown her over for the sake of a juicy commission. If I’d not soured her whole life just to advance my paltry career.’

‘Then twelve years on she might not have tried to murder her husband?’

‘That’s it, isn’t it? That’s the whole point. That’s what I can’t put out of my mind.’ I looked at him directly. ‘You remember that summer’s day we sat in Russell Square, puffing on our cigars, gazing avariciously at the spot where the Thornton was to be built?’

‘Of course.’

‘If I’d told you then why I was going to Clouds Frome that
weekend
– what I meant to do there – what would you have said?’

‘It’s an easy question to answer now, old chap. Now we know what became of the Thornton and of the lady you abandoned in order to build it.’

‘And of my marriage,’ I countered. ‘And of
your
health.’

‘Yes. All of those things, waiting to ambush a pair of swell-headed young men. But we didn’t know any of it then, did we? We didn’t know what was lying in wait for us.’

‘So what would you have said, without the benefit of hindsight?’

Imry gazed past me into the middle distance. ‘I don’t know, Geoff.’ Then he looked back at me and smiled. ‘And we’ll never know, will we? It’s too late to find out.’

Chapter Four

FRIDAY 14 JULY
1911 was, like so many days that summer, one of unremitting heat. London was a furnace and to quit it for the weekend was in some ways a relief. But the four-and-a-half-hour train journey to Hereford also gave me unwanted leisure in which to consider what awaited me there. In my pocket I carried the gold-edged invitation to Victor’s house-warming, copperplate sepia on a cream ground with a pen-and-ink study of the Clouds Frome frontage at its head.
Mr and Mrs Victor Caswell request the pleasure
… It was as much as I could do not to tear the card into shreds and cast them from the window. Clouds Frome was my creation and this was the first time I was to pass a night beneath its roof. But it was also likely to be the last time. Whatever the outcome of my visit, it was hard to imagine that I could ever return.

I reached Stoke Edith, the little country station a few miles short of Hereford which was the nearest stop to Clouds Frome, around two o’clock, and set off to walk the rest of the way along the lanes. The locality seemed stunned and breathless, the orchards and fields sapped of colour. I found myself wishing it could have been dark or cold or wet, anything rather than this azure-skied perfection which only deepened the shame I felt at my intentions.

A half-hour tramp took me into the wooded hills and fields above the flood-plain of the Lugg. Even with the height I had gained, however, there was no relief from the heat; Hereford and the distant horizon waved like wheat in
the
stupefying haze. Then, as I rounded Backbury Hill and began to descend towards the village of Mordiford, Clouds Frome itself came into view.

To see a house that is elegant in its own right as well as appropriate to its surroundings is always a pleasure. To see it and know one owns it adds pride to that pleasure. But to see it and know one built it – designed it, crafted it, shaped it in every particular – is a unique joy, a deep and abiding source of satisfaction. So it was for me that day, when I saw Clouds Frome, newly finished and not yet mellowed by time and weather, but already sure of itself and its setting, already displaying the qualities I had striven to bestow upon it.

I set my bag down by the hedge, leaned against a field-gate and lit a cigarette. As I lingered there, smoking it through, I let the shape of the house – its sun-etched image of roofs and gables – imprint itself on my mind. The curving drive; the orchard awash with blossom; the wooded hilltop behind: these were the frame, these were the context, of the house I had brought into being. And the walls; the windows; the high chimneys; the sunlight flashing on the tall panes of the swelling bay: these were my own, these were the products of my hand and brain.

Fifty yards down the road, I came to the entrance and turned in. The pillars on either side were raw and white, the paint on the name-board so fresh it might only just have dried, the tarmacadam on the drive black and unblemished. But all that, I knew, would change. Lichen would mottle the pillars, the paint would fade and peel, pot-holes and weeds would invade the drive. Where would I be, I wondered, and what would I be doing when age and decay made their first inroads in all this proud immaturity?

I started up the drive slowly, savouring the leisurely pace of my approach. The beech trees that would one day make a leafy avenue of the route were mere staked saplings now, offering no obstruction to my view of the house, and the pillars and beams of the pergola stretching out on its
flagstoned
causeway above the orchard were bare of the wisteria that would one day swathe them. Workmen were active amongst them, however, fixing flower-baskets and what looked like fairy-lights to the undersides of the beams. Preparations for the house-warming were evidently well advanced.

I rounded the curve in the drive and gained my first view of the front of the house. How strange it was to have no mundane business to conduct there, no problem so simple as plumbing or damp-coursing to solve. Would that I had, I could not help thinking. Would that I had a dozen recalcitrant stonemasons to face rather than the one person I was bound now to betray.

I must have been seen from the house, for as I moved across the courtyard towards the arched porchway, the oaken door opened and Danby, the butler, smiled out at me in greeting.

‘Good afternoon, Mr Staddon. It’s a pleasure to see you.’

‘Hello, Danby. How are you?’

‘Very well, thank you, sir. Let me take your bag. Gleasure will deliver it to your room.’ A footman appeared behind him: tall and well built with sleeked-down black hair, a squarish jaw and strangely mournful eyes. When he took my bag from Danby, it was obvious that it seemed much lighter to him than it had to us. ‘We’ve put you in the orchard suite, sir,’ Danby continued. ‘I do hope that meets with your approval.’

‘Couldn’t be better. Have you many guests staying?’